Thursday, December 13, 2012

Update on the MediaFire debacle...

Onward!

EDIT: RS season 4 and AT season 5 are currently back up on 4shared. Let me know if there are any problems, since for some reason all eps are available, but I can't see a few (I'm thinking it might be caching that's the issue).

EDIT 2: Oh hay, they moved everything to a publicly inaccessible folder. WELL THAT DIDN'T TAKE LONG. Off to the next site. Next up: ZippyShare. Also, JumboFiles is out of the question until they get their shit together (their upload sever is dead or something I dunno).

EDIT 3:Zippy is up for testing. I think I may just do a Pastebin link list in the end. That's a little easier to manage.

Thanks you guys for the suggestions. I'll retry 4shared for the
SD uploads too. I think they deleted my account when they did
that site overhaul.
But anyway, I'll be uploading S5 for AT and S4 for
RS first for the next few days, then I'll gradually add in the earlier seasons along with Gumball's two seasons. I may just
split them off into different accounts so the limit won't be so easily
reached (things may get a little messy on my end but whatever).
Oh, and I'm definitely considering that VPN idea. If I can get this whole thing organized and stable,there's a chance that I'll be taking on two more shows (most likely Dragons and Gravity Falls).

There are also some concerns brought up in the last comments section:

Torrents: Yeah, there is the option of torrents, but that 6 strikes policy rolling out is among my list of concerns doing this (plus DDL seems to be the easier option for most folks). If I'm able to get a VPN later on/the "Six Strikes" policy isn't followed properly at all, I'll consider it again.

Converting HD eps to .mp4: I usually just use PS3 Media Sever to transcode them since Xbox 360's WMC is such a pain in the ass to work with, even with its own native file format. This thing's especially nifty with .mkvs as long as they're not 1080p. I'll still retest the waters and try uploading in HD .mp4 again.

That's such an ass-backwards argument. As an encoder, you generally want your release to work on as many platforms as possible, not just what's best for one group of people using it.

MP4 is a much more widely supported format. People don't need special codec packs to play it. They can use their stock Quicktime if on Mac, or stock WMP on Windows. Of course it's better to be using VLC or a codec pack, but not everyone does and shouldn't be expected to.

The only real reason MKV is good is due to it's capability to handle various softcoded subtitles, but the releases here don't use subtitles, so there is no point.

You really should IVTC your encodes, dude. These cartoons are 23.976 fps telecined to 29.970 fps. You can tell from the source files because there is a pattern of 3 progressive frames followed by 2 interlaced frames every 1/6 of a second (step through frame by frame in AVSPmod, you'll see it). You're deinterlacing instead of applying inverse telecine (IVTC) causing there to be 6 repeated frames per second, a pattern of 4 frames and a duplicate every 1/6 of a second. These duplicate frames cause a bit of jerkiness when played. A proper treatment is to apply IVTC, effectively merging the 2 interlaced frames into 1 frame like it originally was before being prepared for broadcast.

I'll admit I'm not a huge expert in this, but thank you for the constructive info! I have no idea what made me switch from IVTC during season 3 of AT (and I feel real silly for keeping that bad change), and I'll keep that in mind when I encode anything else from here on out.

Probably because you're using Handbrake to encode. That program has a history of not identifying telecined material properly, treating it as 29.970 interlaced instead. Doing it the manual way is the best, but if you insist on using handbrake, at least identify if it is telecined first by encoding a 30 second sample using the preview button, and go through the sample frame by frame, looking for duplicate frames. If you see a duplicate frame every 5 frames, then you know the source is telecined and handbrake isn't identifying it correctly. Make sure you have decomb and detelecine set to default (Denoise and deinterlace to OFF), and set the frame rate to 23.976/Constant, and handbrake should detelecine it properly.